[Ads-l] A new(?) habit of journalistic preposition dropping

[Dan Goncharoff]

My reaction is that these are unnecessary prepositions, don't interfere
with meaning, and are influenced by social messaging.

On Tue, May 14, 2024, 4:07 PM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Two bits in the American news leapt out at me recently (both from
> *WashPost*
> incidentally):
>
> * A headline: "Americans will find voting easier — or harder — depending
> where they live". — Patrick Marley; *The Washington Post;* "Politics:
> Democracy in America" column; 2024-04-08;
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/08/voting-laws-swing-states-2024
> * A sub-headline within an article: "Dorsey bolted Bluesky when he realized
> it had failed to escape that responsibility after all." — Will Oremus; "Why
> Jack Dorsey gave up on Bluesky"; *The Washington Post*; "The Technology
> 202" column; 2024-05-14;
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/14/why-jack-dorsey-gave-up-bluesky/
>
> In both cases, a conventional preposition has been dropped, resulting in
> text that for me required having to momentarily stop and re-parse the
> sentence (which is not something a journalist or their publisher wants to
> happen – that's a break-point at which a reader may click away to something
> else).
>
> The more conventional ways to phrase these things would be "depending *on*
> where they live" (or "depending *upon* where they live" if someone wanted
> to sound more formal), and "Dorsey bolted *from* Bluesky".
>
> The parsing problem is that both *to depend* and *to bolt* have alternative
> meanings than the ones intended by the writers, and the intended ones are
> at least a bit obscured by the loss of their prepositions.
>
> I'm not certain if this "anti-preposition" behavior is a regionalism or a
> subcultural thing (perhaps tied to an age group). They might even be
> distinct cases, e.g. the former a regionalism and the latter slangish.
> Since
> both were headlines or headings, it's also possible they're just
> "headlinese" compression. Either being an outright typo isn't off the
> table, either; in both cases, it's how my brain first interpreted them.
> *WashPost* in particular has had an untoward number of blatant typos in it
> over the last several years, probably as a result of allowing newswriters
> to push content to the live website and email feeds with less than the
> former level of editorial oversight, in an effort to keep up with
> accelerated Internet news cycles.
>
> PS: The first of these examples is also weird in using spaced em dashes as
> parenthetical punctuation. According to the bulk of my style guide
> collection, either unspaced em dashes, or spaced en dashes are are used for
> this purpose, but the two styles don't mix. I'm not sure if this is a weird
> house-style habit of *WashPost*, or just an error by a particular writer or
> editor.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org